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CPU Cooling with 15 Liters of Water
ninjagin writes "While not an OC-er, I do enjoy reading about the lengths people will go to on their way to a better CPU cooling solution. I ran across this very interesting article at overclockers.com about this guy's immense 15-liter water cooling rig for his home office PC. Might be just the kind of thing to have the contractors include when they pour your next garage slab."
Does anyone else think that some people take things too far? This is the computer equivalent of buying a beat up car and spending thousands of pounds modding it to make it look "cool". Different strokes for different folks.
Am I the only one who thinks it's absurd that there even is a need for something like this for reducing noise in current computers? I mean, I could understand it if the guy was some compulsive tinkerer who overclocks everything in sight, but for silence in a home office PC?! It seems insane.
I sometimes think that, for those of us who don't play the latest games anyway, PC's are becoming too powerful for their own good. Most current PCs have a large pile of case fans, a big noisy CPU fan, two fans in the power supply (sometimes very noisy, sometimes not), a small and very noisy fan on the graphics card, and another one on the chipset. I've seen mods that add fans to RAM, although those are still only needed by overclockers.
Six sick
If you're not overclocking why even bother?
Because he can.
Because by putting this on the internet, now someone else can who may not have been able to before.
Because of the joy of building something.
Because it's quieter now.
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
When the system was finally completed, the flow rate was tested and determined to be 3L/minute.
I'd guess that his estimate of the flow rate was off because his pressure drop calculations assume a straight pipe - they make no allowance for the effect of the multiple 90 degree elbows in his radiator.
Maybe you should have your hearing checked out.
I was not annoyed by the cars, the wind or (most) people back in the days when the PCs didn't have any fans in them.
The annoyance began with the Pentium Classics (the fan bearings would wear out after a while) and culminated in the 72 W AMD CPUs and the monstrous graphics cards with a half-pound heatsink and a high speed fan.
There was some light at the end of the tunnel when Intel released low-power (30 W) Tualatin PIIIs. One could almost run a 1.2 GHz/512 MB cache Tualatin without active cooling. I used a huge heatsink, tweaked the fan so that it would run only at around 700 rpm and padded the case with noise-absorbing material. This coupled with a silent Maxtor 5400 rpm hard drive, fanless graphics card and noise-killer PSU made the system practically silent.
BOO! TERRO
If you're going to use ground temperature, though, why not go the whole way, and use a geothermal heat pump? Run non-reactive tubing through your yard (or vertically, if you want to), run a liquid coolant through that tubing, and use the 17 C ambient earth temperature to heat and cool your PC without drilling holes in your foundation.
And while you're at it, you can also keep your dwelling at a temperature not too far from the temperature at which your computer is kept. And, as a bonus, it'll cost you about $0.50/day to maintain this constant temperature.
Mmmm. Saving two thousand dollars a year of heating and cooling costs -- better add a few more meters of tubing there, to handle the new computers you'd be able to afford.